Hey Maybe it's a good idea to create a brand new sticky thread, where we will gather all info and dmesg about OpenBSD running on Laptops...
I mean something alternative to this: http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html

So this is the thread for info about working (or not) laptops with OpenBSD.

I do not have any OpenBSD running laptop so I will not share any info currently

(if you have any other interesting resources for OpenBSD laptop then let me know or just add a post to this thread with them)

__________________religions, worst damnation of mankind"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus TorvaldsLinux is not UNIX! Face it! It is not an insult. It is fact: GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU's Not UNIX”.vermaden's:linksresourcesdeviantartspreadbsd

Everything works perfectly. If anybody needs dmesg or xorg.conf let me know.
ThinkPad 390E runs 1024x768 (max possible for hardware).
ThinkPad A20p runs 1400x1050 resolution (max possible). DeLL runs 1280x800 (maximal possible by hardware)
The only thing with DeLL is the built in video camera which is not detected by OpenBSD kernel. Not very surprising
as there is no driver for that camera even for windows XP. DeLL ships the laptop with Vista but I got it from my employer
with Winodows XP professional.

The only problem I had was that I had to edit xorg.conf file manually on DeLL Latitude D830 as X -configure could not produce working X server. I think that is more or less expected.

I'm using Edimax/RT2528 instead, driver rum with WPA. Sound is okay, but you have to enable it with mixerctl. ACPI is broken, APM okay apart from the battery status (but there is a battery led at the EEE). Graphics is okay, I don't need anything to configure, just starting X is enough.

Setting the speed with hw.setperf is possible and automatically with apmd -A too. So in the end, apart from some minor troubles, it runs rather well. I can watch movies in DVD resolutions encoded with h264, play all kind of audio files while surfing the web with FF3 etc. And you can even use the build in camera (PixArt Imaging Inc. Digital_Camera) with uvideo and luvcview :-)

openbsd 4.4 works like charm on my old good T22, only PCI POWER MANAGEMENT has to be disabled in bios to get good sound.

freebsd 6.3 works well too, only XFree86 has to be used instead of Xorg to avoid problems with the broken FreeBSD xorg video driver, otherwise fine

nebsd 5 current works extraordinarily well and fast too. nothing has to be changed, just goes as fast as a Russian Katjusia rocket. Dont know how the netbsd guys do it, but it just needs 19 secs to boot and sound works even with skype like brand new. If only they fixed the issue with hplip and kernel.......
netbsd 4 has sound inconsistency...

All in all - approved laptop for all BSD flavours (just do not use it with PC-BSD - mainly for esthetic reasons) :-D

I use a Thinkpad T42p, with OpenBSD 4.3. Everything I've tried works quite nicely. All the Fn+F# key combos I've tried have worked (Fn+F3 for turning off the screen, Fn+F4 for sleeping, Fn+F7 for outputting the display to the VGA port, and Fn+F8 for toggling screen resolution). In contrast, when I briefly tried NetBSD, most of these combos did not work.

For sleeping, apmd has to be set as a startup daemon. I haven't bothered setting up hibernation, since that would mean repartitioning, which I don't have the time or resources for at the moment.

As you can no doubt see, there's lots of hardware by NVIDIOUS in this thing.
The only NVIDIA device which actually works out of the box is Ethernet. Interestingly, the manual for the 'azalia' driver states that MCP77 does work, although I continue to receive boot messages stating 'no codecs found'. If this is in fact a bug in the driver, I guess I should'nt be worried, as azalia is currently being worked on.

Atheros wifi won't work, either, although I just bought a separate USB wifi adapter to remedy this. The AR5424 is recognized by ath, but a quick#ifconfig -M ath0
crashes the system.

The 'nv' driver provided by Xorg appears not to work either, leaving me to use the ugly 'vesa' driver which makes graphics rendering extremely slow.

Right now, I am using 4.4-release, but I will probably follow -current in the coming months.

Aside from poor audio and video performance, the machine runs very fast, and ACPI does not crash the system (although it doesn't appear to work perfectly, either). Using%apm -b
I can successfully check battery status, but%apm -S
does not suspend the machine.

All in all, it is a positive BSD experience, but not perfect. Since I wanted this for school/coding, I think that what I have will suit me well enough for the time being.

Been running Openbsd on this laptop for about 6 months (upgraded to 4GB OcZ RAM and to 60GB OCZ SSD) now, only problem i had was that i had to disable acpitz in the kernel, i use apmd -A just great on amd64 build.

My fingerscanner is supported but i havent found any software to manage it yet (suggestions plz). Also can't seem to get the OS to see more than 3GB of ram.

I also have 1 other HP tc4200 tablet with 1.73 Centrino and 1gb of RAM running my OpenBSD 4.4 firewall, snort, portsentry, aide and some other goodies, that also runs great with i386 build.

Been running Openbsd on this laptop for about 6 months (upgraded to 4GB OcZ RAM and to 60GB OCZ SSD) now, only problem i had was that i had to disable acpitz in the kernel, i use apmd -A just great on amd64 build.

The 4.5 release will have several ACPI related changes, hopefully that won't be required.

Quote:

Originally Posted by There0

My fingerscanner is supported but i havent found any software to manage it yet (suggestions plz).

All USB devices are supported... ugen(4) will always attach if no other driver claims the device, ugen(4) being the USB generic device, programs utilizing devel/libusb are essentially substitute drivers.

Just imagine the x86 has a 32-bit address space.. physical and virtual..

2^32 is 4294967296 bytes, or 4GB.

If you install 4GB of memory you expect to have 4GB detected, unfortunately.. memory isn't the only thing that's mapped into physical address space, legacy I/O.. PCI devices.. AGP aperture.. all these things have priority over the real estate.

In reality, the modern x86 computers has a much larger physical address space.. 36-bit.. 48-bit.. but in the end the architecture is still fundamentally 32-bit, 32-bit register sizes.. 32-bit immediate operands.. etc.. So when you install 4GB of memory only a portion of that is mapped below 32-bit physical, the remainder is mapped above that.

Understanding the architecture you decide to use will make the experience much grater in the long run, I won't go into the details of paging or PXE.. but the overall point I'm trying to make is that OpenBSD properly detects what the BIOS has indicated available.

Greetings BSDFan666, thx for the suggestion on the fprint application, will need to try it one day, the ACPITZ i had to disable also need to be done in 4.3 (both i386 and amd64 builds) I am not so concerned about it though as it is working and the developers are doing a great job.

I am quite familiar with architectures of all kinds, i am not familiar with PXE pertaining to memory, I know the PXE from networking, I am clear that you are referring to adressable memory (virtual and physical) and am not to heartbroken over only seeing 3gb of RAM even on a Amd64 build.

Also I was looking at a Dell Inspiron 1520 with a broken LCD, good price, might be a good upgrade to my 1.73 HP single core running my firewall now.

Just noticed that in my previous post i did not mention what "this laptop" is, its a Lenovo T61, dam fine, sold my Macbook Pro (and my white Macbook with XP Pro on it ) support for WPA2 and other goodies (and of course OpenBSD in general) have made it GREAT to use OpenBSD on any of my laptops, hope there is more people doing the same its a GREAT operating system with excellent code.

The only NVIDIA device which actually works out of the box is Ethernet. Interestingly, the manual for the 'azalia' driver states that MCP77 does work, although I continue to receive boot messages stating 'no codecs found'. If this is in fact a bug in the driver, I guess I should'nt be worried, as azalia is currently being worked on.

My aspire has a crappy (slow) SSD, so I've used the 'noatime' option to minimise SSD writes. This should prolong the life of the drive, and it also has a nice speed improvement. In truth, OpenBSD has saved this laptop. It was unusable under WinXP because the SSD was so slow, but under OBSD4.5 it's typically quite fast .

The laptop came with an atheros AR5424 wlan card, but a mate donated an Intel 3945 card so I could use the wifi. I've got it working with my local wlans, but my university uses 802.1x authentication and thus far I haven't had any luck with wpa_supplicant. As far as I can tell, the wpi driver isn't supported by wpa_supplicant, although the man page for the 4.5 package was last updated in 2007 so I'm not too confident in the package itself...

I'm running xfce4.4.3, firefox, thunderbird, openoffice etc. I've also upgraded the ram from 512MB to 1.5GB, but I've never seen the usage rise above 400MB.

One thing that was concerning me was the lack of security via single user mode. By default, single user mode doesn't ask for a password - it will drop the user at a root prompt, no questions asked. Obviously this isn't a very desirable situation for a laptop, and in my mind it's probably more insecure than windows xp - so I manually commented out the 'secure' attributes listed in /etc/ttys. Has anyone else bothered to do this, or am I just being paranoid?

One thing that was concerning me was the lack of security via single user mode. By default, single user mode doesn't ask for a password - it will drop the user at a root prompt, no questions asked. Obviously this isn't a very desirable situation for a laptop, and in my mind it's probably more insecure than windows xp - so I manually commented out the 'secure' attributes listed in /etc/ttys. Has anyone else bothered to do this, or am I just being paranoid?

The standard arguments in response to these questions are:

If the bad guys have physical access to a computer, all bets are off. What is of most concern is the data on the hard drive, & if safeguards were in place to thwart powering a system on, what keeps these dastardly types from taking the hard drive out of the laptop & mounting it somewhere else?

This is why preventing access is more important.

Also, consider the situation where the root password is lost. How is a system (& more importantly, the data on the disk(s)) to be reclaimed? Again, by having physical access, the password can be changed without knowledge of previous passwords.

If the data is that important and/or sensitive,

Back the data up, & back it up often.

Consider using vnconfig(8) to configure the encryption of user (non-root) partitions. The root partition cannot be encrypted, but /home or other partitions can be. Likewise, encrypting an entire system is not that practical given the performance degradation.

One thing that was concerning me was the lack of security via single user mode. By default, single user mode doesn't ask for a password - it will drop the user at a root prompt, no questions asked. Obviously this isn't a very desirable situation for a laptop, and in my mind it's probably more insecure than windows xp - so I manually commented out the 'secure' attributes listed in /etc/ttys. Has anyone else bothered to do this, or am I just being paranoid?

No, you are not paranoid. You are just ignorant about security. Sorry, nothing personal

[*] Consider using vnconfig(8) to configure the encryption of user (non-root) partitions. The root partition cannot be encrypted, but /home or other partitions can be. Likewise, encrypting an entire system is not that practical given the performance degradation.[/list][/list]

There is "better" way than vnd driver. Read the manpage for softraid and bioctl. It works similar to cgd:

Code:

bioctl -c C -l softraid0

Note that you can encrypt everything besides the root partition when installing from bsd.rd on the
common architectures e.g. amd64.

Example
Assuming that your RAID partition is sd0d, use the following command to
edit /etc/rc

This is your controller and drive as detected by OpenBSD, it appears to be running in PCI IDE compatibility mode..

Now considering you have an Intel SATA controller, the AHCI specification might be supported.. Try looking in your BIOS for a relevant configuration setting, if you do find it.. you'll have to edit /etc/fstab first and change wd* to sd*.

Hope that helps, perhaps it'll fix the speed issues you're noticing.. Windows XP doesn't support AHCI without 3rd party drivers, this is why some vendors disable it by default.

I can understand this point of view for a server, but in my opinion it's a little off for laptops. I fully understand and accept that there is always the possibility for someone to own my machine by pulling the HDD out. In my case it's a bit more difficult - the aspire one has to be pulled to bits before you can get to the SSD, and it's using a ZIF socket or something, but I accept that anyone with enough persistence and know-how can get my data. If I was worried about this, I'd at least create an encrypted container for my data and mount it when I need it, or something.

I only have uni work on this laptop, there's nothing sensitive, so I'm not worried about the data as such. It was more the fact that someone could easily compromise the system if I left them alone with it for any more than 3 minutes that was a bit troublesome.

Quote:

No, you are not paranoid. You are just ignorant about security. Sorry, nothing personal

I don't think ignorant is the correct term? In my mind, ignorant people wouldn't have considered this, let alone bothered to do something about it... I don't make any claims to know anything about security, but I am making an effort to learn as much as I can.

I have read the bioctl manpage and noted that:

Quote:

Use of the crypto discipline is currently considered experimental.

It does seem relatively straight forward to achieve though, and I might look at it in future.

Quote:

Both ocicat and Oko have explained the security aspect of your post, so I'll move onto the SSD issues.

The problems with this particular SSD are pretty well documented over at the aspireoneuser.com forums, and people have turned to a range of different solutions to offset the issues under XP, but I'll be sure to look into this further anyway. In any case, I've seen a massive performance increase in the performance simply because OpenBSD isn't writing to the SSD anywhere near as much.